La Ballon Rouge

I have had a few things happen to me that just couldn't have been a coincidence. Not that i believe that everything is fate and has a deep meaning, but that whenever I think its all random, along comes something so fantastic that it just blows my mind and forces me to admit that somethings are just mysterious and completely out of the realm of logical explanation.

One such incident happened to me one night when I was drunk as hell, walking across San Francisco at 3AM. I used to go to a party in the Mission neighborhood where an old friend of mine, DJ Kyle, was always spinning hip hop at a place called the Skylark. The big flaw with that plan was that i always stayed until bar time, or after, because i was friends with all of the staff. normally being invited to stay would have been great, except the problem with that was that i always ended up shit out of luck when it came time to find a cab back to my place. i would stand on the corner for a while waiting for some sign of public transportation, but being 3000 miles from NYC meant that there WASN'T any after midnight. so i would just point my feet in the direction of my neighborhood and walk the equivalent of about 30-40 NYC blocks.

the other things to factor in, besides my obvious state of inebriation, the ghetto nature of my commute, my appearance, and my nice white headphones, was that i had to go through the hardest section of the Mission and the Tenderloin. to anybody who is unfamiliar with these places, well the Mission is like what you might picture as the worst part of deep East LA or Mexico City. Mexican gangsters and crack-heads fighting over who gets to mug the gringo, especially late night. Then the tenderloin is more like the American version of hell, strung out drug addicts, hookers, pimps, and whatever else you can imagine, Alphabet city circa 1979. now throw in my practice of fearlessly wearing metro sexual outfits and obliviously listening to my ipod, and you have a relatively bad setup.

So there i was, one balmy night a few hours before dawn. swerving all over the place and blasting KCRW on my Ipod and humming to myself as i stepped over debris and bodies and all sorts of obstacles. i rarely stopped my music or paid any attention to people who talked to me knowing that whatever they had to say or offer, i didn't want any. but all of a sudden, coming across the street, right at me, was a single red balloon on a string. the balloon wasn't full enough to lift the weight of its string because it was just floating along, head high, going about the same pace i was. i would have noticed it anyways, since it was crossing directly into my path. but it literally merged right towards me. if i hadn't grabbed it it would have bumped into my face.

I grabbed the thing and just stared at it in amazement. it was just too crazy for me to comprehend considering my history with red balloons. I grew up reading and watching a story called Le Ballon Rouge (the Red Balloon). it was a story about a young boy who finds a red balloon (or it finds him) that ends up proving to be his friend, literally following him around. the balloon gets destroyed by bullies, but then returns with a bunch of colored balloons and lifts the boy up over Paris. to further add craziness to the connection with this random object, i went to a childcare center when i was a baby called "the Red Balloon Day Care Center" on 124th street in Harlem.

Naturally, i was crushed by the sheer odds that a red balloon would be traveling down Valencia Street, floating at head height, and crossing my exact path at that exact time. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THE ODDS?! I think too great to even be called odds.

Of course, i tied the string around my wrist and took it home with me. I imagine what the crack heads of the tenderloin were thinking when they saw me making my way through the hood with a red balloon tied to my wrist. not exactly a tough image. I woke up the next day and the balloon was in the living room by the window. I kept it for 3 years, despite it shrivelling up, like in the movie. i was waiting for it to come back to life.

My take on it, was not that the balloon was alive and wanted to be my friend, or that it wanted to lift me above San Francisco. It CERTAINLY didn't protect me from the shades of the ghetto and in retrospect, it really just painted a bull's eye on my chest. No, it wasn't trying to be helpful on that particular walk. I believe that it must have just wanted to remind me that there is meaning out there, that there is a purpose to the madness. Maybe not one that makes all that much sense, but certainly life is not a bunch of random, unrelated happenstances. it just couldn't be, it would have been blue, or it would have floated above me if it were random. So that's why i saved it all those years. In a way, it was kind of my proof that there is a greater meaning. Or whatever you would call a flying spaghetti monster that breaths life into red balloons.

here is a clip of the original...

and there is a new version out now...